On Sun, 24 Dec 2000 23:23:48 -0500 (EST), you wrote:
>What puzzles me, though, is that <br /> <hr /> <img /> etc are in fact not
>complained about by the validator AFAIK, whereas <meta /> is.
As http://www.hut.fi/~jkorpela/html/empty.html explains in some detail,
<meta /> is in fact equivalent to <meta >> according to HTML rules, i.e.
there is the tag <meta > followed by the plain character >. Since no
plain text outside elements is allowed inside the head element, this
implies a syntax error. In the body part, the syntax allows plain text
after a tag, depending on the context and on the DTD.
>As for XHTML/HTML, are you seriously saying that W3C has adopted a
>standard for the "next generation of HTML", namely XHTML, that is
>incompatible with HTML in both directions?
That's how things are anyway. It would be more serious than it is if
browsers actually parsed HTML correctly. Well, _some_ of them do, it
seems, see news:1em0chv.1l172v0y3se19N@news.bk30.de
(Michael Nahrath in comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html under
Re: Validators and the Word of God, 2000-12-21). But since most of them
do, I'm afraid the main consequence is that people will think that
validation is useless, theoretical, and "not what browsers care about",
even if they'll understand that this is _not_ a "bug in the validator".
--
Yucca, http://www.hut.fi/u/jkorpela/
Qui nescit tacere nescit et loqui